Abstract

We fabricated 10 nm thick nanowires with a width down to 100 nm using the liftoff process. The characteristics of the nanowire show hysteresis and a sharp voltage jump at . Though a 150 nm wide nanowire exhibits the capacity for detecting a single photon at 405 nm wavelength, the nanowire is too wide to detect a single photon at 1560 nm. A 100 nm wide nanowire exhibits the capacity for detecting single photons in the 405–1560 nm wavelength range. This indicates a possible application of as a high-performance superconductingnanowire single-photon detector.

Received 27 August 2010Accepted 29 October 2010Published online 22 November 2010

Acknowledgments:

The authors thank T. Tamamura and T. Ashida for their support with the nanostructure patterning. They also thank K. Semba, K. Ueda, and M. Naito for valuable discussions. This work was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research No. 22360148 from JSPS.